Month: December 2020

Enlarge / Apple Watch series 6, launched this September, offers health and fitness monitoring in a dizzying array of styles. (It can also tell you the time, if you're looking for that.) (credit: Apple)

There's a new version of watchOS, the operating system used by the Apple Watch, out today. WatchOS 7.2 includes support for Fitness+, Apple's new subscription-based fitness service, as well as new cardio fitness notifications.

"Including support for Fitness+" might actually be putting the cart before the horse—Apple Fitness+ requires an Apple Watch to function. The service bundles trainer-led workout videos and regimens with Apple Music, for $9.99 per month, and you can't sign up for it without an Apple Watch. The watch syncs with whatever device you're watching the class on, overlaying metrics and progress measured by the watch on top of the video.

WatchOS 7.2 also includes new cardio fitness notifications:

Enlarge / The Wistron factory in Narsapura, India. (credit: Getty Images / MANJUNATH KIRAN)

Worker protests at an iPhone manufacturing plant in India have caused up to $7 million in damages, Reuters reports. Workers at the plant, owned by the Taiwanese-based company Wistron, say they haven't been paid what they were promised and are demanding better working conditions.

The Times of India has several on-the-ground reports and dramatic video of the protests. The news org reports, "A majority of the nearly 2,000 employees, who were exiting the facility after completing their night-shift, went on a rampage destroying the company's furniture, assembly units and even attempted to set fire to vehicles."

The Times of India also has details on the salary workers were supposed to be getting, with the report quoting an employee as saying "While an engineering graduate was promised Rs 21,000 ($286) per month, his/her salary had reduced to Rs 16,000 ($218) and, subsequently, to Rs 12,000 ($163) in the recent months. Non-engineering graduates' monthly salary had reduced to Rs 8,000 ($109). The salary amount being credited to our accounts have been reducing and it was frustrating to see this." Some workers claim to have gotten monthly salaries as little as Rs 500 ($6.80).

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  The SuperRT project, developed by Japanese engineer and game programmer Ben Carter. That's an FPGA board connected via wires and breadboards to a standard SNES cartridge. [credit: Ben Carter ]

If you've ever wondered exactly how far a Super Nintendo could be pushed, today's surprise reveal of a brand-new SNES cartridge hack, as made by a single engineer, is for you. Behold: the SuperRT chip, a proof of concept of how the "SuperFX" idea of the '90s might have worked with unlimited budgets.

As developed by Ben Carter, an engineer with game-programming credits in game series like Harry Potter, FIFA, and even the 3DS port of Star Fox 64, the SuperRT project delivers pure ray-tracing performance on existing, unmodified SNES hardware. While the SuperRT looks quite unwieldy as a home project, with wires jutting out every which way, you could conceivably slap it into any SNES purchased at a store, then watch it manage real-time light, reflections, and shadows with zero rasterization. It additionally can generate 3D shapes like spheres and planes, then have them intersect in additive fashion to create custom shapes.

The result is a remarkably '90s-looking CGI demonstration, with circular shapes and planes adding to and subtracting from each other while smothered in large swaths of primary colors. This is all the stuff of intense mathematical calculations, not high-res texture trickery enabled by a glut of VRAM. Yet even without realistic textures or smooth color gradients, the realistic light-bounce results and accurate reflections (including effects like inverted concave mirrors) make the scene look particularly alive.

Geekerati icon Alan Tudyk (Firefly, Doom Patrol) plays an alien disguised as a small-town doctor who gets roped into solving murders in Resident Alien, a new sci-fi dramedy series coming to Syfy next month—finally. Based on the Dark Horse comic series created by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse, the show was supposed to premiere this past summer, but coronavirus, pandemic, yada, yada, yada.

Hogan and Parkhouse started publishing the Resident Alien comics in 2012 as installments of four-issue miniseries, with the sixth and final installment forthcoming. Hogan has said he drew inspiration from Twin Peaks, The Man Who Fell to Earth, and My Favorite Martian. The story involves an alien named Harry who crash-lands on Earth and starts solving murders in the remote town of Patience, Washington, while he waits for rescue.

Harry's backstory is sprinkled throughout the miniseries in various flashbacks. He is Captain Ha Re, a biologist by training, and his special empathic abilities help him disguise his true appearance from most humans. The exceptions are the young granddaughter of a local mystery writer and Asta Twelvetrees, daughter of a Mohawk shaman, who can only partially see through the disguise and thinks Harry is a visiting spirit. Those empathic abilities also mean Harry can tell if someone is lying, so when someone in town is murdered in the first installment ("Welcome to Earth!"), he knows the police have arrested the wrong man and sets out to find the true killer.

Enlarge / NASA's Orion spacecraft floats in the Pacific Ocean after splashdown from its first flight test in 2014. (credit: NASA)

The December dawn felt hopeful as we stood outside, watching NASA's Orion spacecraft streak into the Florida sky. We could imagine that America was taking its first tentative step into the future of human exploration of the cosmos.

"This is the beginning of the Mars era," the space agency's administrator at the time, former NASA astronaut Charlie Bolden, said shortly after the December 2014 launch. And in the moment, who could argue? Here was a spacecraft capable of flying to the Moon and back, acing its first test in space.

Six years later, some of the shine is gone. Years of waiting for an encore to that flight have worn away much of the enthusiasm that followed this Exploration Flight Test-1 mission. We were supposed to have seen an encore flight of Orion two years ago and a mission carrying astronauts around the Moon next year. Instead, Orion is unlikely to fly into space again before 2022, at the earliest.

Enlarge / A Frontier Communications service van. (credit: Mike Mozart / Flickr)

A Republican US senator from West Virginia has asked the government to block broadband funding earmarked for Frontier Communications, saying that the ISP is not capable of delivering gigabit-speed Internet service to all required locations.

Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) outlined her concerns in a letter to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai last week. Capito told Pai that Frontier has mismanaged previous government funding and seems to lack both the technological capabilities and financial ability to deliver on its new obligations.

Frontier, which filed for bankruptcy in April, is one of 180 ISPs that won funding in the FCC's Rural Digital Opportunity Fund (RDOF) reverse-auction results announced last week. Frontier is due to receive $370.9 million over 10 years to bring broadband to 127,188 homes and businesses in eight states. Frontier's biggest payout is in West Virginia, where it is due to receive $247.6 million over 10 years to expand its broadband network to 79,391 locations.